Tragedy Tells a Tale of Two Norways

Friday

Jul 29, 2011 at 12:01 AMJul 30, 2011 at 1:03 AM

Anders Behring Breivik longed to live in a different Norway than the one he got.

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Anders Behring Breivik longed to live in a different Norway than the one he got. But in literature, if not in life, there exists a Norway that the anti-Muslim extremist, accused of the country’s largest massacre since the Second World War, might appreciate: a country pure and rugged and unto itself, unspoiled by Marxists and Muslims and multiculturalists and modernity.

This Norway appears in the early pages of “Growth of the Soil,” the epic 1917 novel by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who was once regarded as the soul of his nation. He went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and later sullied his name through his adulation of Hitler.

In the novel, Mr. Hamsun takes us back to a Norway before civilization. A man named Isak treks alone through the thick woods, a “strong, coarse fellow, with a red iron beard, and little scars on face and hands.” He finds a plot to his liking. He clears the land. He peels bark from the birch trees and trades it to acquire materials for building a home. He makes inquiries and finds a wife. He acquires goats.

Everything Isak owns is his; he is self-reliant, self-contained. The world looming beyond his plot can only bring trouble. And trouble it soon brings.

The trouble comes in the form of the state, of order, bureaucracy, the law. One day two officials hike up to the property, one carrying “a lot of papers in a bag.”

“Why, this is a whole big farm you’ve got,” one of the visitors says. “You don’t expect to get all this for nothing?”

Isak is incredulous at first: “he had cleared and tilled, built up a homestead in the midst of a natural wilderness, winning bread for himself and his, asking nothing of any man, but working, and working alone.” But his visitors speak of valuations and boundaries and taxes, of land titles and annual installments, and before long it starts to sound reasonable — or at least inevitable — to Isak.

One of the officials helps him draft a letter: “He now humbly begs to submit this application to the Department: that he be allowed to retain this land.”

The affront of this moment is the affront of civilization itself: what begins with the arrival of the officials in the novel would in real life bring further taxes and paperwork, bureaucracy and elections; the presence of these fictitious others on his land foreshadows the coming of even more fearsome Others as an actual society develops — migrants from other parts of the country, immigrants from other places in the world.

It can be jarring to read this book, almost a century old, and then travel through Norway today. In a way, Mr. Hamsun was prescient. The rugged land that gave us the Vikings has become the improbably decent, increasingly diverse place that gave us the Nobel Peace Prize.

The immaculacy of nature in Norway now contends with an immaculacy of a different kind — that of human order. Nature resists still, but it is the human capacity to organize that has triumphed, here more than almost anywhere. The schools and the health care are practically free. Blight is rare. Things tend to work. Dove soap is stocked in public toilets. Redistribution is vigorous. The middle class is massive, and poverty scarce. The state picks up most of the average worker’s lost wages when he or she is thrown out of a job.

Of course, this cathedral of order grates on people, too. Incomes are high, but so are the taxes. Alcohol can be sold only in certain shops. Special licenses must be obtained for the smallest endeavors. Newly bought cash registers must be shipped from the hinterland to Oslo, in order to be, well, registered.

Traveling in Norway some weeks before the attacks, I sensed a quiet anxiety in many of those to whom I spoke. In building their cathedral of order, they wondered if they had surrendered something of their former selves: had lost the daring and self-reliance of Isak, had removed themselves from the earth, had protected themselves so well from life’s vicissitudes as to drain their vitality away. It sounds strange now, but many asked aloud if Norway had become too comfortable, soft — and whether greatness and invention were still possible amid such calm.

Turid Findebotten has short hair and hard hands and lives in the country’s remote western fjords. She is only middle-aged but still old enough to have sensed her country’s turning.

“In the old times it was a shame to get help from the government,” she said, sipping coffee on a ferry through the fjords. “You just did whatever you could do, took care of yourself and your family, and you wouldn’t ask for help. You would rather starve than ask for help. And now it’s like when small things happen, you have younger people who would call for help immediately, and they will have help.”

Ms. Findebotten lives at the foot of a mountain, in a setting not so different from Isak’s fictional surroundings. Sometimes the weight of all that Norwegian order can be suffocating: “Our government is making laws and rules to protect ourselves against ourselves,” she said. “And it’s strange, because we’re a tough people.”

And yet these tough people have changed. They have accepted that they are no longer Vikings. They’ve come to enjoy a degree of shock absorption from the bumps of fate that places like the United States cannot offer. They have slowly learned to live with those Others, many of them the Muslims that Mr. Breivik, the man accused in the massacre last week, so loathed. Order and law, painted over that old Viking ethic, can be binding, but they now allow the weakest in Norway to flourish without fear of the strong.

One Norway has allowed itself to become another. And its people may mourn the past, but they have also remade themselves and moved on. Norway gained decency in far greater abundance than whatever it was feared to have lost. The tragedy of the attacks is that one angry man seemingly could not accept Norway’s bargain with modernity.